Your Guide to the Politics of Shin Godzilla

I’d wanted to write this story about a giant monster attack and realized I didn’t know how it would play out, point by point. Which government organization would do what, at what moment? Who are the key people? And then it struck me, with the power of discouragement: that story already exists, and it’s one of my favorite movies, Shin Godzilla. So onto the shelf that story went, but the question stuck: what would have to happen if a giant monster attacked? I imagined there’d be a treasure trove of resources for “speculative crisis management” or something like that, but maybe some things are too silly even for the Internet. We’ll have to go straight to the source: how do co-directors Shinji Higuchi and Hideaki Anno answer this question? A closer look at the bureaucratic drama of Shin Godzilla might help us understand their political critique.

Who’s Responsible When Godzilla Attacks?

A disturbance in Yokohama Bay floods the Tokyo Bay Aqua Line Tunnel. The entire cabinet gathers at the prime minister’s residence, basically the White House, to coordinate a response. Based on eyewitness reports and footage from multiple sources on-the-scene, this is clearly a biological threat, verified by a scientist who says it’s possible the giant creature will come on land. The prime minister declares a state of emergency and orders a civilian evacuation, and eventually the creature does make landfall. The prime minister also authorizes the Self-Defense Force to mobilize and monitor what seems to be a literally evolving threat. The evacuation radius expands to Tokyo, and Deputy Chief Secretary Rando Yaguchi leads a team in finding a non-military solution, which is to inject the radioactive creature with coagulant, cooling it down as you might a nuclear reactor. The military stops the creature’s movement by detonating buildings, and they administer the coagulant like Lilliputian dentists, creating a lovely Godzilla statue, much like the one near Yurakucho Station in Tokyo. Of course, this isn’t exactly how the Godzilla crisis unfolded, as we see the filmmakers had something of a score to settle.

Fukushima

Co-directors Shinji Higuchi and Hideaki Anno signal their intentions with Shin Godzilla, using specific imagery and themes which mirror those of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. In March 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake damaged three of six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, and as efforts were made to cool these reactors, in comes a 46-foot-tall tsunami over the 19-foot protective seawall. The potential for radioactive contamination to people in the surrounding area was internally acknowledged but not properly communicated. Government spokespeople got on television and downplayed the severity of the crisis, issuing evacuations of miniscule radii. Two months later, plant operator TEPCO, Tokyo Electric Power Company, publicly acknowledged that yes, that was a meltdown. That’s probably not something you want to hear in the past tense. In fact, it was a meltdown on the level of Chernobyl, and the government was not prepared and not being truthful. You might see how a couple of anime nerds were pretty pissed off about that.

A very direct, unambiguous dialogue is made between the film and a Japanese audience, this same audience who would’ve watched Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano on television all day giving updates, inspiring hashtags about his wellbeing and discussions over his signature blue overalls. Prime Minister Seiji Okouchi makes ceremony of his identical uniform before he assumes the podium. What’s funny, though, is that the satire eventually diverges from the source and ends up being far more subdued. Apparently, the chaos behind the scenes of the real-world event skewed more Armando Iannucci. Even still, in Shin Godzilla, the jokes get me every time, and there’s a lot in this movie that gets me every time, like Kamata-kun’s first appearance, but I love how Deputy Chief Secretary Koriyama keeps calling for new meetings. “Let’s reorganize to get a unified initial response” really captures the delirium the real-world politicians experienced in the face of impossible choices, but it allows the film this grave seriousness from which the absurdity springs naturally.

I think that tone is very important here, for as confident as the movie feels, it’s a very difficult story to tell, like precarious over the edge of farce. How do make Godzilla frightening? How do you surround him with a story about bureaucracy and politics? How do you set this story in a world like ours? I mean, we’re invoking a national tragedy with a character who’s gone on to mean more and further things, like kung fu master. Even the crowds running from Godzilla have been parodied, and that’s where his characterization begins here, because he doesn’t get scary until later, when he gets incredibly scary. We have cell phone footage capturing reactions to the creature and the evacuation, so we’re moving from the familiar to the fantastic, and in that, there is a spectrum of emotion. It’s kind of scary, it’s kind of fun, and it’s very chaotic. Inside the prime minister’s residence, it’s disbelief. When Yaguchi says it’s a massive creature, people tell him, “That’s impossible, be quiet.” For this world to be like ours, the prospect of Godzilla would have to be unbelievable. However, this failure of imagination, central to Higuchi and Anno’s criticism, actually comes from a hierarchy of ideas. Yes, Yaguchi is saying something beyond belief, but it’s also that he’s speaking out of turn. Chief Cabinet Secretary Azuma shouts Yaguchi down at the second meeting, and after the giant tail surfaces, what does he do? He calls a third meeting.

Notably, it isn’t just politicians. Higuchi and Anno are identifying something deeper, something shared. After it’s confirmed to be a massive creature, three “scientific experts” are brought in based on their prestige. These are people with names associated with other names, like universities and research organizations. It would be difficult to make yourself vulnerable enough to take a leap of faith or solve a problem creatively if you’re worried about looking silly. These older men stand in contrast to the eventual team of experts who are campily described as outcasts and nerds, basically the “Island of Misfit Toys” from Moneyball. Diverse in gender and age, these are people the government overlooks, but all Yaguchi sees is what matters: their expertise. When Yaguchi first hears about Hiromi, she’s introduced as someone with “low rank,” and he says he doesn’t care. Either he never cared or he’s adapting to an evolving situation. As a note here, I also think it’s interesting that Hiromi, the first of the team, isn’t Yaguchi’s connection, but this guy Shimura’s. Our protagonist’s action in the story is based on trusting the judgment of someone else about someone else. And when Hiromi comes in, if we don’t know she’s a woman, the old guys remind us by chiding her for improper decorum. Her mistake? Disagreeing with someone who wasn’t even in the room. This is the time-wasting seed for the urgency later when time is suddenly of the essence.

Hiromi says it’s possible that the creature can come on land, but the prime minister sides with those three status-conscious men who insist its legs can’t support the weight. They don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, and for Americans today, we know such pettiness can infiltrate the highest levels of government like a welcome-home party. Kamata-kun slithers ashore in one of the film’s most shocking and memorable sequences, set to a haunting and kind of overwrought piece called “Persecution of the Masses,” and everyone in the audience is just sitting there like “What the fuck is that thing supposed to be?” God, this movie is so good. The only Baby Godzilla people like transforms into his second form, and the typical Godzilla action takes on a cutting purpose: we know these people should not be there, and we know whose fault that is. All the accumulated delay coming from disbelief and inefficiency, meetings and meetings, creates a ripple effect. When the prime minister is finally handed a military response package he can stomach, people are still in the city. The first evacuation radius issued by the government in response to Fukushima was 1.9 miles. People within a 6.2-mile radius were advised to go about as normal. Five days later, the American embassy advised Americans in the area to evacuate to a radius of 50 miles. As Yaguchi points out, the two hours they had was plenty of time to evacuate. He’s told to pipe down, choir boy.

The Bad Actors

When Godzilla lets loose with his signature blue flame breath for the first time, it is an extraordinary sequence. The fire breath hadn’t become rote or anything, but it was so normal that you wouldn’t think to make an entire set piece out of it. In fact, since it’s a weapon, it has specific utility, and therefore implicit rules for use. Here, there’s this dramatic buildup and stages of the flame’s intensity. We see how alien the creature is, and yet it rolls a nictitating membrane like a shark. And the scale of destruction is, for the first time, terrifying. He’s so out of control. This is something that is simply too powerful. Higuchi and Anno were sure to throw in some welcome surprises, too, ensuring that the split-apart jaws weren’t the only conduit for what’s more accurately described as a laser beam. These are coming out of his dorsal spikes, his tail, like he’s not even a solid mass, he’s just a painful, radioactive mountain of porous flesh. I didn’t see that coming, and it makes me think: if I were one of these politicians, would I have listened to Rando Yaguchi?

Well, what is he really asking them to imagine? Evacuation, containment; all the pieces are there, but we begin to see the invisible lines between them. It’s not that Godzilla is unimaginable, because that’s a dead end for our metaphor, but that, for example, what’s unimaginable is deployment of the SDF in certain contexts. There’s no precedent for these things, they say, or is it that nobody wants to be the guy who deployed the SDF inside Yokohama Bay? Author Yoichi Funabashi describes a scene which took place four days after the meltdown, where the prime minister was faced with a difficult decision: TEPCO wanted to pull out, leaving no one to continue pumping water into the reactors. Telling them to stay was sentencing them to death. We saw that exact dialogue dramatized in HBO’s Chernobyl, and it’s harrowing.

So, who are these people making these tough choices? The movie introduces everyone with on-screen text, as if daring us to play detective, matching the fictional character’s title to their real-world counterpart in March 2011. We’ll determine if Higuchi and Anno are calling anyone out. There are a lot of these chyrons, by my count around 80, but of course we’ll narrow it down to the bad actors. How do we tell who in Shin Godzilla gets the blackest eye? We’ll use the Rando Rule: marking down anyone who disagrees with our hero. As a result, I’ve got five: Chief Cabinet Secretary Ryuta Azuma, Deputy Chief Secretary Koriyama, MLIT Minister Yanagihara, MEXT Minister Sekiguchi, and of course, Prime Minister Seiji Okouchi.

Prime Minister Seiji Okouchi / Naoto Kan

Prime Minister Seiji Okouchi’s sin is his passivity. He sat there, did very little, except for when he could make himself look foolish. As the head of state, he represents not only Japan but the Japanese character on the world stage. International relations pick at old wounds and surface uncomfortable questions about sovereignty. As it turns out, Okouchi is a staircase — a staircase to nowhere. His real-world counterpart is Naoto Kan, who served as prime minister of Japan for 15 months, which is apparently longer than usual. I can’t even imagine the chaos of annual presidential elections. Evidently, Japan got tired of it, too, as Shinzo Abe most recently was in office for eight years in a row, apparently having served for one beforehand?

It’s difficult for me to judge Kan’s, you know, nuclear disaster performance, but his reputation seems to be somewhat even. He resigned, but never faced criminal charges. He wasn’t necessarily the face of the disaster, and there is a much larger boogeyman looming. Part of the centrist Democratic Party of Japan, during the crisis his opposition attempted to remove Kan with a no-confidence vote, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. As a politician, you’ll always be accused of turning a crisis into an opportunity, so you might as well do it anyway. Among the Japanese populace, his approval rating plummeted to below 20% following the disaster. However, not long after his term, he was selected by Ban Ki-moon of the UN to be an advisor on renewable energy for Japan’s Technical Committee on Renewable Energy.

Whatever that is, I think that kind of sums it up for me. This is a guy known for pushing for governmental reform and accountability, like reporting the unfortunate truth behind the 1980s HIV-tainted blood scandal. Believing he failed his duty as prime minister, he stepped down, which is unfortunately, more than we can say for some people in a similar situation. In terms of satire-worthy actions during the crisis, either nothing specific can be directly attributed to him, or everything can. He was the guy in charge, so he takes the blame, but as we’ll see, there were others. In fact, the fictional Okouchi seems to be more of an adaptation of Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary turned TV star.

Chief Secretary Azuma / Yukio Edano

Now, Chief Cabinet Secretary Azuma is quick to shut Rando down with his silly giant monster theories, because this is serious business. Funnily enough, Okouchi simply repeats the sentiment by noting that meeting minutes are being kept. So something interesting is going on here, where this character is the active foil to the prime minister, suggesting press conferences or demanding decisions be made. With him, we’re able to feel that passivity from Okouchi, but that doesn’t make Azuma look better by comparison. Because he is more aggressive, he’s a warrior of the old guard and just as much a problem.

In March 2011, the chief cabinet secretary was this Yukio Edano fellow. Apparently dubbed Japan’s Jack Bauer for his tireless work, in particular he was noted for those famous blue overalls, which means that he maps better to Okouchi than Kan does. It might be kind of a composite, where elements of Edano and Kan inform Azuma and Okouchi. As the face of the government’s response to the disaster, Edano was accused of misleading the public. In 2012, Kan and Edano testified before an investigatory committee and the former chief cabinet secretary said that he was only passing along what the experts told him, which should sound familiar. Even if it’s true that the government didn’t know how bad the situation was, that fear of being the bringer of bad news is still the focus of Shin Godzilla’s criticism.

Yukio Edano, The Japan Times

And because that criticism gets at the psychological rather than the personal, as we see with the composite, it’s not quite humanizing in that way context humanizes, but we are spreading the blame evenly. “This is how dysfunction works,” and whether or not you blame the individual players for their part is up to you and your reaction to when they all blow up. This brings us to the deputy chief secretary, who is actually three people in one.

Deputy Chief Secretary Koriyama / Tetsuro Fukuyama, Kinya Takino, and Yoshito Sengoku

Like Yaguchi, Koriyama is a deputy chief secretary, and he isn’t necessarily a bad guy, doesn’t have that much input, but he does call for meetings and restructuring instead of realizing that once gathered, a team doesn’t need to be gathered again. A change of scenery might help, but it’s the same building — how different could it be? In real life, there were three deputy chief secretaries: Tetsuro Fukuyama, Kinya Takino, and Yoshito Sengoku. There were just a lot of people in the room, and Higuchi and Anno make that point early. In fact, at the time, only Fukuyama and Takino were in the room, but Sengoku was brought on after having left the government just months before following his censuring by the House of Councilors, which is like the US senate but twice as large.

The real star here, though, is Fukuyama, who held the party line by passing blame off on those TEPCO experts. I’ll let him speak here, via a press conference convened on May 23rd, 2011:

REPORTER: This is not a question about the content of the meeting, but rather about the delay in injecting seawater, which, it has been noted, could have had an impact on the way the accident unfolded. What is the Government’s view on the impact of this delay?

DEPUTY CHIEF CABINET SECRETARY FUKUYAMA: What do you mean by delay?

REPORTER: When I say “delay,” I mean the fact that the injection of seawater was stopped and then later restarted.

DEPUTY CHIEF CABINET SECRETARY FUKUYAMA: The decision to stop the injection of seawater was not made by the Government, but by TEPCO. As we were unaware of the experimental injection of seawater, it is not possible for an order to have been given to halt such an operation.

It goes on like this, and the exchange is actually pretty amazing. Another reporter asks about why meeting minutes weren’t kept, and Fukuyama says basically that they were too busy to keep a record of events. That’s convenient, as the Asahi Shimbun suggests it’s tantamount to a cover-up, calling it “a monumental level of government ineptitude.” This is a point where the Okouchi administration actually did better, despite the silly talk of monsters on the record.

MLIT Minister Yanagihara / Akihiro Ohata / MEXT Minister Sekiguchi / Yoshihiko Takaki

Next we have the MLIT minister and the MEXT minister, which I suppose is the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism minister and so on. In Shin Godzilla, this is Yanigihara and Sekiguchi. Sekiguchi is handed a note which plants the idea that the radioactive disturbance in the bay is a hydrothermal vent. Yanagihara follows up, saying it must be a volcano. “What else could it be?” Neither theory really makes sense, and are directly refuted, but these guys are oddly defensive about it.

I couldn’t find anything on MEXT Minister Yoshihiko Takaki, so I’m not super sure why Higuchi and Anno are picking on the Ministry of Education, Culture, Science and Technology minister, other than perhaps the science and technology part. Why in God’s name is that a ministry? Like, MLIT makes sense, those things are sort of related. Sports? Science? What isn’t technology? This ministry is made up of departments that manage each of these things, so I have to wonder if they actually speak to each other? What would they say? I guess all of these things relate to future-proofing, like educating students, but I just don’t know. And regardless, it’s MLIT Minister Akihiro Ohata we need to be looking at.

I mean, I couldn’t find much more information on him, but he is cited by an article in The New York Times, which notes that he came from nuclear energy and successfully lobbied for nuclear energy to be Japan’s main energy source. This points to one of the key ingredients to the crisis: the relationship between the Japanese government and nuclear utilities like TEPCO. Because nuclear energy was so tied into energy independence — again, issues of national sovereignty in postwar Japan — nuclear advocates could press the government for subsidies and incentives. It was a point of national pride. This deregulation meant that officials ignored risks despite many warnings from researchers and whistleblowers, going back years. I mean, people were familiar with tsunamis, and that friggin’ seawall was unbelievable.

Of course, TEPCO doesn’t have an equivalent in Shin Godzilla, but they walk away from the Fukushima disaster looking like the real bad guys. Up until a committee investigation in August 2011, TEPCO was still redacting official documents, consistent with its opaqueness thus far. There are also more grey examples like Hideki Akasaka, special advisor to the prime minister, who isn’t one of the bad guys, but often pressures Yaguchi to not rock the boat. What’s significant with his character is that he is specifically not a buffoon, not one of these goofy dinosaurs who’s only looking out for himself. This is also how the machine of bureaucracy can be expressed, and it’s far more powerful to hear “no” from a friend. As Michael Keaton says in Spotlight: “A guy leans on a guy.”

Of course, the old guard gets wiped out by a super-effective Godzilla blast, and the government is reshuffled. Yaguchi is promoted to bureau chief of “Unidentified Creature Response Special Task Force,” and he’s gonna run things differently: flat structure. No titles or seniority. So we have two problems: the bureaucratic dysfunction in Shin Godzilla and that of the Japanese government in response to the Fukushima disaster, and these are comparable. We have one solution: this one, in Shin Godzilla. The question now is, how does it hold up as a solution for the real world? And this is where we stop for a moment. Is this where we’re at? We’re expecting movies to solve actual problems, maybe because they’re the only thing I experience and get all my ideas from?

What’s the Point?

I feel like when you spend a lot of time thinking about movies you eventually run into this dead end. For the life of me, I can’t find this blurb anymore, but in the midst of global celebration to the film Parasite, a critic quoted on Wikipedia once upon a time wondered if it was so significant, because it didn’t say anything new about poverty and class warfare — which I agree with. However, this is the kind of sentiment that bothers me. Obviously, as a Korean, I will never stop talking about Parasite, but more so, it gets at that question of the social utility of art and the purpose of art. I’m beginning to think that we don’t so much have to answer that question, but disentangle those terms. Parasite, for example, is not important because it did anything to solve the wealth gap in South Korea, in fact it inadvertently encouraged “poverty tourism.” It’s important because by the mechanics and efficacy of its filmmaking, artistry so striking it was visible, it reached everyone. Except for that guy, obviously. The reactions around the world were so moving, and it was like everyone was connected. And that’s nice, but it feels insufficient still. To take another Korean example, there’s the K-drama Cheer Up, subject of my first video here. There wasn’t some big message like “war is bad” or “poverty is bad,” per this discussion, but it generated in me a strong sense of empathy. I felt something — I was stirred emotionally — and the best answer I have on the purpose of art is that it can make us feel things. Maybe that’s the endgame, maybe when we feel things we’re suddenly vulnerable to new ideas or perspectives. Maybe neither of those is more important than the other.

With Shin Godzilla, Higuchi and Anno don’t have to solve their society. They don’t have to do anything and it can still be a great film. It’s scary and intense and funny and all these things. It’s less of a math problem than maybe it presents as. When Yaguchi does something we imagine the filmmakers find agreeable, it’s not “This is what politicians should do in real life,” just because the analogue is so direct. My read of the movie is that it’s the fantasy of a government working well. In addition to being cathartic, I think there’s social utility in that, just like I think we need more narrative representations of better worlds, like hypothetical Star Trek or Steven Universe at the forefront of “hopepunk,” because that way we’re able to visualize something better, come to a consensus and walk towards it. We see the sorts of basic human qualities which undergird large, positive governmental action, just as we understand the psychology of the problem people. Yaguchi and friends are open-minded, empathetic, curious.

Maybe this is another trap, I don’t know. It’s tempting for me to focus on these more universal qualities: psychology, emotion, rather than face what is, of course, a very political film, and possibly a nationalistic one. Now, because I’m not from the nation in question, I should be offended. But seriously, is there something here? You know, Shinzo Abe thought this was a great movie, and he’s the worst. It’s a movie about Japan’s place in the world, about how the apparatus that exists may be restructured to solve an impossible problem — a fantasy of a government working well. And like the American Godzilla movies, there’s a whole lot of military. Unlike most other Godzilla movies, the military kind of saves the day, and we’re sure to know exactly who does what and which plane is which and what operation. No country out there is trying to be merely adequate, so where do we draw the line between pride and pointy nationalism?

Military/Autonomy

Especially these days, if we read the room, there isn’t so much appetite for teasing out the nuance. Nationalists and nativists and racists might be different, but they were all represented at the US Capitol insurrection. The UN nuclear resolution passes, which means the nukes are a-coming, but Hideki and Acting Special Advisor Shuichi Izumi convince the new prime minister of the “Yaguchi Plan,” to “act unilaterally on humanitarian principle,” and that principle has a basis in nationalism. During the production of Shin Godzilla, Shinzo Abe was famously pushing for revisions to Article 9. Because the military in the film isn’t presented as obstructionist or immoral, because of the Oshii-level hardware fetishization, for some critics there’s textual reason to believe the filmmakers side with Abe. This would be quite the surprise. Shinji’s all grown up and now he’s Gendo?

Sure enough, the satire doesn’t extend from the government to the military. No silly Bong Joon-ho “guy falls down in the gym” (that’s the guy who directed Parasite). It may have been redundant, it may have doubled the runtime of the film. Maybe as part of the fantasy of Shin Godzilla, the levers of power must be functional, and the critique is limited to those who handle the levers. More importantly, though, I haven’t seen much evidence that the military response to the Fukushima disaster was flawed or part of the problem Anno and Higuchi would be criticizing. The Self-Defense Forces played a major part in cooling the reactor, rescuing survivors, transporting many tons of supplies like food and water. Understandably though, it’s a complex situation, and what was considered the SDF’s largest mission is gonna mean many things to many people. US armed forces assisted in these efforts, and perhaps this multilateral Operation Tomodachi — which means “Operation Friends” — justifies that controversial Okinawan Marine Corps base. Maybe the deployment of 100,000 SDF troops is an opportunity for war simulation. I am certain Kim Jung-un saw that mobilization on his smart TV.

How does a country express autonomy in a way that doesn’t frighten other countries or irritate old geopolitical wounds? In 2020, Abe left office without realizing his Article 9 dream, and that same year, a public opinion poll found that 69% of people opposed him on it. Japanese people are fine with not going to war. While in Shin Godzilla, we see how stopping the monster is an international effort, with constant communication and favors called in between Japan, America, and Germany, it’s kind of shady. Nobody trusts anybody else, there’s always leverage and compromise and back channels. It’s not so much cynical as it is resigned, that this is simply how the world works. These young Japanese politicians learn how to better operate inside that global framework, moving away from depending on the US in particular.

But why? What’s so great about national sovereignty in a globalizing world? Aren’t we all supposed to be partners? I mean, the desire for energy independence laid the groundwork for the Fukushima disaster. Rely on other countries for things, have partners, it’s okay. Well, that’s easy for me to say as an American, of course. We rely on other countries for things, but we pretend that we don’t. American history also differs from Japanese history despite intersecting with it violently and tragically, because aside from the very beginning, America was never occupied by a foreign power, its sovereignty was never violated. Our national pride comes from propaganda. Japanese national pride might come from something real, and serve an actual function.

Here’s a great answer: I think that’s the answer. Shin Godzilla is so deliberately composed and edited, with every moment feeling precise. This makes sense, given that Higuchi and Anno are both essentially animation directors. Hideaki Anno got his professional start in anime, from wowing Hayao Miyazaki with the God Warrior up through his personal psychodrama Neon Genesis Evangelion, spiritual brethren to Shin Godzilla. Shinji Higuchi went from Evangelion to doing special effects for the ‘90s Gamera trilogy and directing effects-heavy movies like Attack on Titan. Nothing that happens in their frame isn’t designed. The visual language they develop for the geometric proceedings and the civilian chaos is objective. While cinematography typically balances subjects with the background, I think the camera here favors the architecture more than the people. Maybe this is something to do with the democratization of heroism that comes later. Anyone can emerge from this situation as the Guy, because Godzilla puts everyone at the same level. Politicians, military, scientists, whoever, they’re all playing their part and no one is special until they do something.

Conclusion

One of my fears with Shin Godzilla is that I like it in concept more than as an actual movie, because its brilliance begins on paper, and as a writer — with one story on the shelf — that’s what I most easily identify and appreciate. Although this was not the case, I like to think that this movie was a social satire first, and the Godzilla formula was adapted to express that satire. It all just comes together so beautifully, and even as a prolific writer, I’m able to recognize that the execution as a film is considered and extremely thoughtful. To me, Shin Godzilla is the ultimate Godzilla. The elements that make up this movie have always floated around in the series, but hadn’t yet found perfect expression. But is there such a thing as “perfect” with Godzilla? Do we want perfect? Absolutely not. This is just one expression, and it’s the one I find truest to the original concept and the most compelling overall. I also think Godzilla: Final Wars is the “ultimate Godzilla,” so it’s just about taking an idea and fulfilling what to my heart becomes a promise. Godzilla means a lot to me, and for certain filmmakers and audiences, there’s a lot of meaning potentially there. He’s also a giant dinosaur.